FATAL DESEASE

by C.H.I.F.F.R.E. - Berlin, May 2001

Patriarchal structures are reproducing themselves in the same way for over hundreds of years. To be a women means to be concrete in the sense that she owns a body to give birth, that she is handicapped by her feelings, that she is a captive of the private sphere, that she could be judged as a hysterical person and first and foremost that she is irrational, infantile and natural.
On the other hand, there is the man as the master of the abstract. He is the prototypical public subject, he loves the adventure, he is adult, he thinks and speaks in abstract terms, he makes plans, he thinks strategically, he is always in control of his emotions, his body and his environment, in one sentence: the man is more civilisation and culture than nature.
Don't look at this difference between the abstract/male and the concrete/female as a natural fact, look at it as a cultural construction to found and uphold the male power. This power is nothing else than a principle to ascribe semantic values: the abstract way is always presented as the more sophisticated and the more capable to survive, whereas the concrete way is judged as negative, as unqualified for civilisation and culture, as dangerous and even as apocalyptic.
After this semantic difference was constructed, it must be upheld and ascribed to the male and the female: women always get proofed that they are unable to invade in the abstract field of male thinking and acting or they are pushed back in their reservation of concreteness. So you can say from the male cultural point of view, that women are FATAL: to be fatal means to be fateful, to be lethal, to be ruinous. But the question is: for whom and for which system?
You can also find in 'fata morgana' or in 'infantile' the root of the word FATAL: the women has no existence in the male sphere, like a fata morgana she is vague and fleeting, you can't trust in her. If you follow a fata morgana, you will never reach your goal. The fatal women is infantile and you don't have to take serious her speaking and acting, only in the way you are taking serious a child who is playing 'to be an adult'. You are laughing at her thinking 'what a sweat little thing', so you can better feel your own greatness.
But if we are aware of the fact that manliness and masculinity are only a great show without substantial contents performed to draw distinctions and to keep up the cultural construction, we can infiltrate with fatal behaviour the male principle of power. To infiltrate this principle is necessary because general ideas of intelligence, beauty, illness, strength and weakness are founded in it.
If you think about this, you may see that old-fashioned feminist ideals could never destroy this common sense, because they reinforce the cultural difference of power between the male and the female. The simple wish to be able to do the same things as the typical men is the best prove that the abstract principle is the more sophisticated and the best model for the future. The imagination that women are the better human beings is too naiv to change things, because you don't have to think about structures of power. Sure, it is important for a lot of women to think like that, because they have to survive and they have to be resistant against the permanent oppression. But there are also some men suffering under the same structures of power, getting excluded and made to women, judged as infantile persons and pushed in the concrete, if they don't fit in the men's world. They are feeling bad, if this happens. But they have learnt that the best reaction is to get stronger and to collect power (physical power, knowledge), so that this will never happen again. What a stupid egomantic reaction.
For the future, it is important to destroy the relationship between the concrete and the abstract, and it has to be clear, that thinking in categories like 'women against men', unlike thinking in categories of power, will never lead to any change.
Nowadays, it is obvious anyway that the concrete is a persiflage, a simulation, a hyper-reality. Nature is nothing else than a backdrop you can take a walk in. We tend to believe, if we think on the immense destruction of nature, that there had been something like a golden age of pure nature we could get back to, if we wanted. The body becomes a resource for biological reproduction, for the fashistoid belief in the average or for post-religious welfare (be fit and you have more success, more sex, more money and so on). Sexuality will be separated from reproduction. On the other hand, the abstract stands at the edge of its self-annihilation, like a gardener, who creates with his activity permanent motives for new activities, just until the only way out of this circle is to destroy the garden or the self-annihilation, so that the impossibility becomes real: the last but final activity. The abstract as a principle of cultural dynamics was never connected to something like a concrete purity. That what we think of as natural has always been an abstract cultural invention. But for a long time in the history of the western world, the invented concrete was able to limit the destructive capacity of the abstract.
Nowadays, the abstract has become senseless and has reached a state of independence and a potential for destruction, that living is easier for every human without responsibility for the whole. The independent abstract is an independent epidemic machine, which we can only call in words like 'society', 'globalisation', 'trend' etc. We are living in a non-stop apocalypse.
If we want to take this situation as a chance for change, we must think anew about the politics of identity.
Identity is nothing else than an introduction of a linear order in a multidimensional complexity, so that everyone has a castle of his own, which he has to defend or that he can extend with consumer products. Identity in this sense makes you available for the demands of the new market, and you can remark that our neo-liberal ideal of freedom is nothing more than a hollow promise that makes you economically usable.
The film is not the only possibility to invent an order in your life experiences. You can sample yourself and create a new identity by this cultural technique. Be culturally fatal and see your existence as a game, as a construction. To be complex and to be a construct means not that everything is possible and that total flexibility can begin now, because constructions will be able to exist only in a world where nobody can be the fittest to survive, where people have the tolerance and the solidarity to accept others' constructions. If you look on the other side, you can imagine that racism, oppression, capitalistic exploitation are the new outside field of civilisation because they can't work together with principles like those described above. We can create new identities with differences that don't have to be differences. A fata morgana is a beautiful event and the question, if this event is real or not is boring and not really interesting.